Beyond the Cubicle

How does the insecurity of work affect us? We know what job insecurity does to workers at work, the depressive effect it has on morale, productivity, and pay. We know less about the impact of job insecurity beyond the workplace, upon people's intimate relationships, their community life, their vision of the good self and a good life. This volume of essays explores the broader impacts of job precariousness on different groups in different contexts. From unemployed tech workers in Texas to single mothers in Russia, Japanese heirs to the iconic salaryman to relocating couples in the U.S. Midwest, these richly textured accounts depict the pain, defiance, and joy of charting a new, unscripted life when the scripts have been shredded. Across varied backgrounds and experiences, the new organization of work has its largest impact in three areas: in our emotional cultures, in the interplay of social inequalities like race, class and gender, and in the ascendance of a contemporary radical individualism. In Beyond the Cubicle, job insecurity matters, and it matters for more than how much work can be squeezed out of workers: it shapes their intimate lives, their relationships with others, and their shifting sense of self. Much more than mere numbers and figures, these essays offer a unique and holistic vision of the true impact of job insecurity.

Allison Pugh is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity and Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children and Consumer Culture.

INTRODUCTION: THE BROADER IMPACTS OF PRECARIOUSNESS Allison J. Pugh
PART I: CULTURE, EMOTIONS, AND THE FLEXIBLE SELF
Chapter 1: The Making of a "Happy Worker": Positive Psychology in Neoliberal Organizations Edgar Cabanas Diaz and Eva Illouz
Chapter 2: Boomer and Gen X Managers and Employees at Risk: Evidence from the Work, Family and Health Network Study Jack Lam, Phyllis Moen, Shi-Rong Lee, and Orfeu M. Buxton
Chapter 3: Unemployed Tech Workers' Ambivalent Embrace of the Flexible Ideal Carrie M. Lane
Chapter 4: Laboring Heroes, Security, and the Political Economy of Intimacy in Postwar Japan Allison Alexy
Chapter 5: "Relying on Myself Alone": Single Mothers Forging Socially Necessary Selves in Neoliberal Russia Jennifer Utrata
PART II: INSECURITY AND INEQUALITIES
Chapter 6: Different Ways of Not Having It All: Work, Care, and Shifting Gender Arrangements in the New Economy Kathleen Gerson
Chapter 7: Racialized Family Ideals: Breadwinning, Domesticity, and the Negotiation of Insecurity Enobong Hannah Branch
Chapter 8: Moving On to Stay Put: Employee Relocation in the Face of Employment Insecurity Elizabeth Ann Whitaker
Chapter 9: Between Gender Contracts, Economic Crises and Work-Family Reconciliation: How the Bursting Bubble Reshaped Israeli High-Tech Workers' Experience of Balance Michal Frenkel
Chapter 10: Security-Autonomy-Mobility Roadmaps: Passports To Security for Youth Jeremy Schulz and Laura Robinson
Chapter 11: Intimate Inequalities: Love and Work in the 21st Century Sarah M. Corse and Jennifer M. Silva
AFTERWORD Christine Williams